Tag: Initial Search

With all the promise for mobile search, 2D bar codes, bar code scanning, etc. I thought I would share a personal experience today and my personal thoughts on where I think mobile search and product convergence will be an amazing step forward for consumers.

I have a large screen projection TV; the bulb blew out and I wanted to replace it. While I found many online places I could have purchased one and waited for delivery, I wanted to purchase one locally within a 25 mile radius. This was also an experiment of sorts. After making several phone calls and discovering that local stores were closed or do not stock bulbs or parts for TVs 2 or more years old I tried something different in my searching.

My initial Google searches and authorized repair store searches came up empty. The store I’ll plug for free is Fry’s Electronics. When I went to their site, my initial search by part number came up empty on both the TV model # and the bulb model # I was looking for. After doing a broad search on the site by TV brand, I stumbled upon the bulb # I was seeking.

Once I found the bulb, everything else was awesome; I was able to check for in-store pick-up before I jumped in my car.

Conclusion: Brick and mortar sites both on local search and internal search fail to deep link effectively for mobile local search. At the point in which brick and mortar stores have internal search that is deep enough for consumers to find parts or products easy, both desktop and mobile search will be limited in their effectiveness to help consumers find the products they are looking for via mobile device.

For mobile local search to be powerful for brick and mortar stores, they will need to make sure their products are deep linked on the web. A category level only web presence will not have maximum effectiveness for mobile local searches. Once brick and mortar stores allow their products and parts to show up on the web for local search based on a part number, zip code, sku, etc. they will start to realize the power of local search on mobile devices.

Most know that Twitter results are now being displayed on Google and Bing. But how quickly do potential results appear? I did a quick test on both Google and Bing. See screen shots below for “watch olympics live online”

As you’ll see in the first screen shot, Google shows two results on my initial search.

On my second query, I first posted my search phrase in a tweet. The results are amazing. Google displayed my tweet in about 60 seconds (that’s fast!!)
Notice the Twitter post highlighted by yellow. Google shows the time in which the tweet was posted. Google also displays Twitter results in its SERPs / organic listings. Also, notice in my second search, Google displays Twitter results in an active news scroller. Google certainly does a better job at displaying Twitter search results than Bing. (see Bing results in last image)

Bing Twitter results: While Bing did display my test tweet I’m not sure if Bind displayed it as quickly as Google. I’ll need to run another test or two.
One of the things I don’t care for in Bing Twitter results is that you need to know enough to go to http://www.bing.com/twitter/ – The method that would seem to make the most for searchers is to just display Twitter results directly in SERPs as Google does. It also appears that Google results from Twitter are a bit more relevant than (I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Do you care if results show up in SERPs or on a dedicated page?)